Emma Goldman’s Struggles for Utopia: Feminism and Ambivalence

Emma Goldman was a lifelong believer in anarchist revolution and the utopian ways of living that such revolution would surely inaugurate. As an anarchist, activist, and theorist, Goldman maintained that sexual freedom was central to revolution, and that unchosen authority of any kind was counterrevolutionary. Yet for all her fervent certainties, Goldman’s articulation of the means to bring about anarchist utopia was shot through with political ambivalence: about gender, race and sexuality. Clare Hemmings, professor of feminist theory at the London School of Economics, invites us to consider Goldman’s conflicting views as a means to think through current dilemmas and power relations, or indeed to have a glimpse of utopia ourselves.